Today we will talk about the design and functionality of the proprietary GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards. We will test two graphics cards like that in an SLI configuration, compare it against a dual-processor GeForce GTX 690 and other products.

Overclocking Potential

Although the Palit GeForce GTX 680 Jetstream is pre-overclocked back at the factory, we managed to slightly increase the GPU frequency of our sample and also get a substantial increase in its memory frequency. The GPU was stable at a base clock rate of 1155 MHz (and a boost clock rate of 1233 MHz). The graphics memory could work at 6900 MHz.

The most interesting thing is that the temperature of our Palit remained at the same level, 78°C, under peak load at the same speed of the fans!

Palit’s cooler is highly efficient indeed.

Testbed Configuration and Testing Methodology

All graphics cards were tested in a system with the following configuration:

The frequencies of GeForce GTX 680 graphics cards tested in SLI configuration were adjuted to the nominal values:

In order to lower the dependence of the graphics cards performance on the overall platform speed, I overclocked our 32 nm six-core CPU with the multiplier set at 37x, BCLK frequency set at 125 MHz and “Load-Line Calibration” enabled to 4.625 GHz. The processor Vcore was increased to 1.46 V in the mainboard BIOS:

Hyper-Threading technology was enabled. 16 GB of system DDR3 memory worked at 2 GHz frequency with 9-11-10-28 timings and 1.65V voltage.

The test session started on May 1, 2012. All tests were performed in Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate x64 SP1 with all critical updates as of that date and the following drivers:

The graphics cards were tested in two resolutions: 1920x1080 and 2560x1600. The tests were performed in two image quality modes: “Quality+AF16x” – default texturing quality in the drivers with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and “Quality+ AF16x+MSAA 4(8)x” with enabled 16x anisotropic filtering and full screen 4x or 8x antialiasing if the average framerate was high enough for comfortable gaming experience. We enabled anisotropic filtering and full-screen anti-aliasing from the game settings. If the corresponding options were missing, we changed these settings in the Control Panels of Catalyst and GeForce drivers. We also disabled Vsync there. There were no other changes in the driver settings.

The list of games and applications used in this test session includes two popular semi-synthetic benchmarking suites, one technical demo and 15 games of various genres:

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat (DirectX 11) – version 1.6.02, Enhanced Dynamic DX11 Lighting profile with all parameters manually set at their maximums, we used our custom cop03 demo on the Backwater map;

Hard Reset Demo (DirectX 9) – benchmark built into the demo version with Ultra image quality settings, one test run;

Batman: Arkham City (DirectX 11) – version 1.2, maximum graphics quality settings, physics disabled, two sequential runs of the benchmark built into the game.

Battlefield 3 (DirectX 11) – version 1.3, all image quality settings set to “Ultra”, two successive runs of a scripted scene from the beginning of the “Going Hunting” mission 110 seconds long.

If the game allowed recording the minimal fps readings, they were also added to the charts. We ran each game test or benchmark twice and took the best result for the diagrams, but only if the difference between them didn’t exceed 1%. If it did exceed 1%, we ran the tests at least one more time to achieve repeatability of results.